The Stepson

by Martin Armstrong

  With other church-goers they crossed the square to the south porch, towards which a slow stream of men and women and carefully-dressed children percolated from the four quarters of the town; and as they entered the porch and plunged suddenly from glowing sunshine into darkness, the noise of the bells was muffled as suddenly as the light to a dull, smothered drone drifting among the unseen vaults of choir and transepts.

  David led the way, and crossing the transept they turned through the arch of the dark rood-screen, on the top of which towered the organ, and near the screen they took their places.

  Kate sat enthralled. She had never suspected that the Abbey, whose dark mass she had casually noticed on market-days closing the western side of the square, was a place so vast and so awe-striking. The huge columns seemed to grow up out of the floor with a visible motion and then sprang out on either side into great arches; the long, many-coloured windows seen wholly or in sections through the grove of columns, hung suspended, it seemed, in the darkness behind them; and in the heights above, the stone sprayed out, tier above tier, into delicately wrought arches and windows and finally, changing into grey wood, branched into the dark confusion of a roof huge as the heavy wooden skeleton of a great house; and all this towering richness and solemnity dwarfed the sound and stir of the men and women moving on its floor to the thin shuffle of autumn leaves.

  By now the peal of bells had stopped, giving place to a single tenor bell which seemed to be hung at an immeasurable height overhead; and soon that ceased also, and from the organ above and behind them a deep, darkly luminous mist of music rose and began to loom and spread till it had filled the great cave of the church.

  How restful it was to sit there, dim, motionless, and silent. Where was it, Kate asked herself, that she had found that sense of rest and security before? And raising her eyes to the dark roof, she knew suddenly that it was in the great barn at The Grange. Yes, here in the Abbey as there in the barn was the same feeling of quietude and comforting antiquity. Whatever happened in the world outside, here, she knew, everything would always be the same. Joys and sorrows, wars and dissensions, the generations dying and coming to birth, and the ceaseless flight of time passed by these ancient sanctuaries like winds and rains and the flights of birds, leaving them unchanged, havens of calm and stability in a world of turmoil and flux.

  Thoughts and feelings, unuttered and even undefined, passed through Kate’s mind as she sat beside David in Elchester Abbey, until the rising of the congregation, like the visible growing-up round her of a dark thicket, brought her to her senses, and she stood up as the organ began to play the opening bars of the first hymn.

  David bent his head to her. ‘This is a good one,’ he whispered, and at once he began to sing lustily. Kate joined in and they sang together as they had done at The Grange, David taking the bass to her treble. From time to time she glanced at him with a kind of enchanted amusement, for David sang like a man singing not hymns, but jovial songs, letting his voice go free with a confident abandonment that delighted the hearts of those that heard him, so that an old gentleman, whose seat was immediately in front of him, remarked to his wife as they walked home after the service:

  ‘Believe me, my dear; if the Almighty is half the man I believe Him to be, that young man’s singing must have done Him more good than the mumblings of all the rest of us put together.’

  Kate, standing beside him and singing with him, felt herself lifted above the earth and the confused and trivial desires and despairs of earthly life, into a oneness with him, a union of soul complete and all-satisfying. The intervals of prayers, lessons, and sermon were for her intervals of rest between these raptures of singing: their words were lost to her, for she had reached a state where words have been left far behind and the prayers of dissatisfied souls crying to a God apart have lost all meaning and all use.

  As they left the Abbey together, her body and soul were warm with contentment and her heart kept telling her over and over again:

  ‘This thing for once has been mine, surely and irrevocably. Whatever happens now can never take it from me.’

  So her heart spoke and her conscious self was content, not trying to understand the meaning of those inner sayings.

  XI

  It was strange and bewildering to Kate to be rushing in the gig through the sweet April air after the exaltation which had come upon her in the Abbey. She gazed questioningly at the slowly wheeling trees and fields and at the blue motionless hills beyond them, and then she looked sideways at David sitting beside her with the reins and whip in his hands. That look brought her back to earth once more.

  She looked at him again, calmly, dispassionately, half ashamed of her curious ecstasy of the past hour. He was, she recognized clearly, an ordinary young man, a young farmer with large red hands, self-contained, pleasant, and, like all young people, a little hard. What, she wondered, had he been feeling while they sang together? And she answered herself, coldly rational as she now was, that he had been wrapped up simply and entirely in his own enjoyment. The divine intimacy which had soothed and thrilled her so profoundly had been experienced by her alone. In fact, she told herself, it was nothing but fancy. Then, recalling the intensity of her emotion, she denied absolutely that it was fancy. It was real, more real than anything she had ever known, and it was almost incredible that, standing beside her, David should not have been aware of it. He turned his head and their eyes met. His gaze was cool and transparent: no ecstatic memories abashed and deepened it. ‘He knows nothing,’ she said to herself, and feeling that she must speak to him she asked:

  ‘Are you fond of going to church, then?’

  ‘Well,’ replied David, ‘I like the music and the singing. The singing’s rare. But the rest isn’t much in my line. I never could abide sermons, and as for all this talk of “fading is the world’s best pleasure,” and us being miserable sinners and all that, well, it seems all wrong to me.’ He turned to Kate with a clear blue glance and it seemed to her that she saw to the bottom of his clean, cool, simple young mind — a mind like a shallow pool, clear of all the dark desires and angers and the lurking intensities that troubled her own.

  ‘Are you a miserable sinner?’ he asked, and his question evidently expected an unhesitating denial.

  ‘Well, I’ve been miserable before now,’ said Kate, ‘but I don’t see much reason, I must say, for calling myself a sinner.’

  ‘Well, I’m not miserable and I’m not a sinner,’ answered David, ‘and the world doesn’t seem to me at all a wretched place, so I’m not going to say it is, just because it’s been put down in a book.’ He set his jaw and stared in front of him between the horse’s ears.

  ‘It depends on what you mean by being a sinner, I suppose,’ argued Kate. ‘Different people have different ideas.’

  ‘I should have thought it was fairly plain,’ said David. ‘It’s sinful to steal and tell lies, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, that’s sinful, sure enough.’

  ‘And my great-grandmother was a miserable sinner, no doubt.’

  Kate laughed. ‘Your great-grandmother?’

  ‘Yes. But I don’t suppose you’ve heard about her. She was a grand lady, you know, my great-grandmother — the wife of Sir Jonathan Brand.’

  ‘And who was he?’

  ‘A rich gentleman, a baronet, who lived at Down Place, about twenty-five miles from here. There’s still a Sir Jonathan Brand there. The eldest sons are always called Jonathan. Well, my great-grandmother married Sir Jonathan Brand when she was young. Twenty-four or twenty-five she was, I believe; and Sir Jonathan was an old man of seventy. He had been a great huntsman in his day, had Sir Jonathan; but in his old age he got the gout, and that, of course, was the end of his hunting. They say his temper was something terrible. However, young Lady Brand was very fond of riding, and she not only hunted, but she used to love to ride about by herself on the Down Place estate.

  ‘Well, my great-grandfather was the son of a farmer on the estate: he was about my a
ge at the time of the story. Nobody knew, so my mother told me, how he and Lady Brand came to meet; but meet they did, and one night Lady Brand disappeared from Down Place.

  ‘They searched the woods and coverts and dragged all the ponds and sent round to all the villages and farms round about to inquire if she had been seen, and then it came out that Farmer Tarras’s son had disappeared too. A few months later old Sir Jonathan got a letter from his wife saying that she was living with young Tarras and that she wasn’t coming back to Down Place. Now that was a strange thing for a grand lady to do, wasn’t it - to run away with a farmer’s son?’

  ‘Very strange,’ said Kate, and, as soon as she had said it, it occurred to her that if young Tarras was anything like his great-grandson it wasn’t so strange, after all, for a young woman married to a fierce old man to run away with him. ‘And what happened to her after that?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said David. ‘That is, nothing out of the ordinary. She just settled down happily for good and all. Old Sir Jonathan never answered her letter, but he had all her belongings and all her grand dresses packed up and bundled off to her. He wanted to get the place cleared of her altogether, I suppose. A fine lot of dresses they were too.

  ‘My great-grandmother had a little money of her own, not much, but enough to get along on, and she and Tarras bought a small farm somewhere down in Devon and settled there. They had a couple of sons during the next few years, and when the news came that old Sir Jonathan was dead, they married. After that another son was born. He was my mother’s father.’

  ‘Was your mother’s name Tarras then?’ asked Kate, thinking of that photograph in the album which she had refused to allow Ben to show to her.

  ‘Yes, Rachel Tarras was my mother’s name. It was she, of course, who used to tell me the story of my great-grandmother.

  ‘Well, all those fine dresses were no more use to my great-grandmother, of course. A farmer’s wife in a small way could never get herself up in finery like that: so what did she do but cut the dresses up and use the stuff from time to time for trimmings and cushion-covers and suchlike. And besides that, she began to work the scraps into a great patchwork quilt.’

  ‘Your lovely patchwork quilt?’ cried Kate in delighted surprise; for, at the thought that she had seen and touched that precious relic, the story had suddenly lit up into vivid reality for her.

  ‘Yes, my quilt,’ said David. ‘It came to my mother from her father, and now, of course, it’s mine. She worked at it little by little in her spare time and it took her over twenty years. She died just before it was finished. My grandfather’s wife finished it off a few years after her death. My mother used to show me where the old work left off and the new began. You can see it at once: the bit of new work isn’t nearly so fine as the old.’

  ‘It was a strange thought to make her finery into a quilt,’ said Kate, musing.

  ‘My mother said it was for a token that she was done with gaiety and idleness, turning the useless finery into a quilt to keep her and her children warm.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Kate. ‘It might have been that she liked to keep her old grand days in mind and so she worked the remains of them, day by day and little by little, into something belonging to her new life. A quilt will outlast a hundred dresses and so the old finery has been preserved. If it hadn’t been for that quilt you would most likely have known nothing of what a fine lady your great-grandmother had been.’

  ‘Why,’ said David, looking at her open-eyed, ‘I never thought of looking at it in that way’; and he remained silent for a long time as if fascinated by the idea.

  Kate too fell into a reverie and neither spoke until the gig swung into the soft cart-track and they knew that in a few minutes they would be back at The Grange.

  They had pulled up in the yard and Kate had left David to unharness the mare and was crossing the yard to the house-door when Emma came out of the house. Kate saw that her face was flushed and even sulkier than usual. Kate had not seen Emma before starting for Elchester that morning and so, as she passed her now, she wished her good morning. But Emma passed without a word, without so much as a glance. It was as if she were completely unconscious that Kate was there as she hurried past her, her face closed into a brooding anger.

  Then, as Kate entered the house and went down the stone-flagged passage towards the stairs, another strange thing occurred, for she heard Mrs. Jobson’s voice issuing, loud and angry, from the parlour. The parlour door was ajar and she could hear every word.

  ‘Well, I’m not going to stand by and watch it going on, so you needn’t think so,’ she shouted.

  Ben’s voice broke in fiercely. ‘Now look here, woman: if you begin talking to me like that, there’ll be trouble.’

  ‘Trouble!’ Mrs. Jobson snorted. ‘There’s no use you trying to frighten me, Benjamin Humphrey, and you know it. Trouble indeed! It’s you that’ll be in trouble, not me. Now mark my words, if there’s any more of it I shall go, and before I go I shall speak; so you’d better take warning.’

  From where she stood – for at the sound of the voices Kate had instinctively stood still – she heard Ben draw in his breath as if his rage were suffocating him, and when he spoke his voice was tense and sibilant.

  ‘Get out of my sight, woman. Clear out, I tell you.’

  Kate heard a sharp blow as if he had struck the table or the sideboard with a stick.

  ‘O, I’m going out of your sight all right,’ came Mrs. Jobson’s answer. ‘I’ve said my say and you’ve had your warning. Now remember, I keep my word, and you know it.’

  Kate had stood absolutely immovable in the passage, shocked and bewildered, not knowing what to do. She had not dared to pass the parlour door to go upstairs to her bedroom, for she felt that she had blundered below the peaceful surface of things into some sinister underground mystery of which she knew, and was supposed to know, nothing. So she stood, one hand planted against the passage wall, her pale face drawn with apprehension, a cold, horrified shame clutching at her heart. Then, realizing suddenly from Mrs. Jobson’s last words that she was on the point of coming out into the passage, she tiptoed back towards the yard-door and turned into the kitchen.

  At that moment footsteps rang on the stone flags and David came into the house. Kate seized the opportunity to emerge from the kitchen, and Mrs. Jobson, meeting them both coming down the passage, must have supposed that they had both that moment entered the house.

  ‘There you are!’ she said. ‘I’ll bring in the dinner at once.’

  And a few minutes later they were seated at table in the parlour and everything was as it always was. And it seemed to Kate, as she sat there watching Ben who was chatting cheerfully as he carved the roast beef, that she had passed, in that five minutes between the yard-door and the stairs, through some nightmare hallucination which had existed for her and her alone.

  What could it mean, this sinister mystery upon which she had intruded? And Emma with her angry face rushing across the yard? She, surely, must have some part in the mystery. During the rest of the day the memory of what she had seen and overheard kept striking a grim, discordant note across the tune of her thoughts, and next day too it kept obtruding itself upon her, sinister and startling like the croak of a raven. But she did not now reflect upon it nor try to solve the mystery, for her mind was full of another matter. To-morrow David was going away. At ten o’clock he and Ben would start from The Grange, driving in the gig to Elchester station.

  For Kate, the thought of David’s going played a sweet, sad refrain to all that was said or thought or done throughout the rest of the day. How they would miss him at The Grange! To herself, though he had turned out so different from her expectation, he had brought what she had so ardently hoped for, an element of warmth, tenderness, youthful gaiety. No one watching her would, perhaps, have seen in her the smallest difference; but within, since his arrival, all had quietly and secretly changed. All her being had thrilled to subtle and exquisite new life, as different from the o
ld as waking is from sleeping.

  And yet Kate found, as she examined and savoured the change, that it was not complete happiness which had come to her; for though there was much happiness in it, there was also a sense of unfulfilment. If only she were older, old enough to be David’s mother, so that she could imagine thoroughly that he was her son, or, better still, if only she were actually his mother, then, Kate told herself, her happiness would be perfect. The pleasant brotherly-and-sisterly affection to which, it seemed, they had already attained, was not enough for her starved heart, and her memory went back regretfully to the young boy of her imagination to whom she might have been a mother in all but fact.

  After supper that evening they sang together again.

  ‘It’s our last chance,’ said David. ‘We shan’t have another chance till autumn, and goodness knows what may happen before then.’

  He laughed to lighten the effect of what he had said, for he had seen in his stepmother’s face how that final phrase he had used had touched something serious and superstitious in her. He had noticed, before that, this seriousness, this undercurrent of something indefinable and strange in his stepmother. It would cross her glance suddenly, a brief, almost tragic flash, when they were talking or singing together: it lurked in the strange intensity of that brooding gaze with which he sometimes detected her in the act of watching him. It embarrassed David when it appeared, alienating him for a moment from this woman to whom, otherwise, he had taken a great liking. But only for a moment. It never occurred to him to seek for any explanation of it, for he was not given to suspecting a hidden significance in things which he did not understand. And so the embarrassment vanished at once with the cause of it, like the shadow that flies with the flying cloud. He went to the cupboard, therefore, and got out the song-book, and once again they sat together at the table with the book before them, while Ben sat in his arm-chair by the fire, smoking and listening.